Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it. But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.
Stats for nerds
28recommend
72mentions
47people
2013–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For an equally idealistic and improbable proposal about the future of the internet and personal data, I'd recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future."
- Doctorow’s written a few books here - not sure if they provide an answer, but he’s been one of the better thinkers in this space:
Similarly, I liked Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?”, which deals with similar topics:
- Again, I must recommend everyone read Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns The Future".
It's an excellent book, and so so many of the issues raised in it are playing out blow-by-blow.
- They’re both thoughtful and nuanced in analyzing the promise and peril of the relationship between technology and civil society, as well as economic perverse incentives. Strong recommend for “Who Owns The Future?”, every bit as relevant 10 years after publication.
- Lanier is an effective wordsmith and I applaud the point he's making. Many of the same (good) arguments from his books like "Who owns the future" and "You are not a gadget". But alas I feel he is pissing into the wind.
The reasoning engine that emerged with the latest rounds of GPT is a pre-fire, post-fire phase-change. The impact of the ability to coerce automated reasoning via natural language (even if it's flawed etc) from a digital runtime is.. difficult to overstate. His appeal for a just and equitable distribution of value honouring "data dignity" is noble. But the world in which that could happen doesn't exist.
Instead there is an insane, frenzied, wild-eyed land-grab going on because it's painfully apparent that raging rivers of money and control are going to accrue to the masters of the new frontier (precisely because it will be possible to own and implement an acute version of precisely the problems Lanier tries to address in his equitable digital economics treatises).
Our capitalist economic systems are not able to "think of the people". Every dev + mba with any inkling at all is racing to get in on the "opportunity".
Governments will react a decade or more too late.
This train has already left the station and a great many people are going to be left stranded.
Lanier is right to (continue to) ring this bell. Too bad he's more Stallman than Jobs, because this cause desperately needs backable champion.
- I'm going to post my usual:
Everyone should read "Who Owns the Future?" by Jaron Lanier where these topics a dealt with, and with much more intellectual rigor.
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